Karl Lagerfeld's Cruelest And Most Controversial Moments

His accomplished career is only one side of a polarizing figure.

Pascal Le Segretain/amfAR12 via Getty ImagesKarl Lagerfeld and Heidi Klum at the 2012 amfAR Cinema Against AIDS event. The supermodel is one of many famous women who Lagerfeld said wasn't pretty or thin enough for his liking.

Karl Lagerfeld, who died on Tuesday at age 85, was a fashion icon and a talented designer. But his accomplished career is only one side of a complicated man.

His Islamophobia

During an appearance on a French talk show in 2017, the German designer delivered a rather baffling rebuke of his native country's acceptance of refugees from Muslim-majority countries on the behalf of... Jewish people. Lagerfeld himself was not Jewish.

"You cannot kill millions of Jews and then take in millions of their worst enemies afterwards, even if there are decades [between the two events]," he said on the show "Salut les terriens." He then went on to add: "I know someone in Germany who took a young Syrian and after four days said: 'The greatest thing Germany invented was the Holocaust.'"

According to the British paper, The Times, the French channel that aired the show got several hundred complaints about Lagerfeld's comments.

His relentless and often cruel fixation on criticizing women's bodies

Between 2000 and 2001 Lagerfeld lost nearly 100 pounds in order "to be a good clotheshorse," and put out a diet book. Some people speculate that a lifelong feeling of unease with his own body was what caused him to be so vicious about women he didn't think fit fashion's standards — particularly if he thought they weren't thin enough.

Here are just a few examples.

On Adele: "She is a little too fat, but she has a beautiful face and a divine voice."

On Pippa Middleton: "Kate Middleton has a nice silhouette. I like that kind of woman, I like romantic beauties. On the other hand, her sister struggles. I don't like the sister's face. She should only show her back."

On people who criticize unhealthy beauty standards in the fashion industry: "These are fat mummies sitting with their bags of crisps in front of the television, saying that thin models are ugly... no one wants to see round women."

Dan MacMedan via Getty ImagesHeidi Klum, who Karl Lagerfeld described as "too heavy" to be a model, at the 70th Emmy Awards on Sept. 17, 2018.

His equal-opportunity criticism of men's bodies

He said of Seal — who at the time was married to Heidi Klum — "I am no dermatologist but I wouldn't want his skin. Mine looks better than his. He is covered in craters."

The time he sent flowers to an accused rapist

Dominique Strauss-Kahn was director of the International Monetary Fund in 2011, when a hotel maid in New York accused him of rape. When he returned to Paris, Lagerfeld sent flowers to DSK and his wife. His defence of his friend was somewhat murky — he both suggested that women willingly have sex with him, and that it's hard to be a woman around DSK. Either way, Lagerfeld was on Strauss-Kahn's side.

He told Style.com that women "get horny from politics, from power. And he had unbelievable charms. He is really charming. He's fun, he's great. He's a sweet guy — as long as you're not a woman. That's the problem."

"If you don't want your pants pulled about, don't become a model!" he said in an interview with the fashion magazine Numéro at the height of #MeToo. "Join a nunnery, there'll always be a place for you in the convent."

His use of blackface and yellowface

Of course Lagerfeld is hardly alone in this in the fashion world. But, yes, he had Claudia Schiffer appear "black" and "Asian" in a 2010 editorial shoot.